Hill Towns (24 page)

Florian’s, Sam told me, was the oldest café in Italy; it and its rival across the piazza, Quadri, had once been spoils of war. During the Austrian occupation of 1814-16, Quadri became a favorite of the Austrians, and most Venetians shunned it and patronized Florian’s. Many old Venetian families still held to the practice.

“Ada likes Quadri,” he said, grinning. “But then Ada likes all things Germanic. Ada would like to be a Hapsburg.

Sometimes, when we were here, we’d have breakfast at the same time in different camps and wave spitefully at each other. I never could abide the Germans, and she can’t resist them. The old boot-in-the-face thing.”

“The way you talk about Ada is shameful,” I said, only half teasing. “She keeps your slothful life spinning like a top.

What on earth would you do without her? What would any of us have done, on this trip? She’s been kindness itself.”

“I know,” he said. “I ought to lay off her. You’re right; I truly could not exist without Ada. I’d dissolve in a pool of sheer entropy in a week. She runs my life like a Swiss watch; she’s decorative as hell and good company to boot. She rarely bores me. I hate the kind of man who calls a woman a good sport, but she really is. I can’t think who else would put up with me.”

“You make her sound like a camp counselor,” I said.

“What’s in all of this Sam Forresthood for Ada?”

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He grinned widely, the grin of a red wolf.

“Mrs. Sam Forresthood,” he said.

“You arrogant ass,” I said, laughing. “Maybe you’re lucky to be Mr. Ada Forrest.”

“Maybe,” he said. “You ready to go do some painting?

Damn this rain. It never rains in Venice in July.”

Ada and Sam Forrest’s suite at the Europa and Regina was all she had said it would be. The little alleyway that had led off toward the hotel’s plain, small campo from the main route to the piazza had been dark and empty and glistening in the after-lunch lull, and the campo itself deserted, and the entrance unprepossessing. But inside, the hotel had the thick-carpeted, wax-shining amplitude of all good private spaces everywhere, and the second-floor foyer that opened into the Forrests’ two great rooms was large, with dully shining tile and a fine old chandelier. Beyond it, the sitting room that was now the Forrests’ bedroom, by virtue of the austere white-draped bed that had been moved into an alcove, was enormous. Dark antique furniture sat like islands on the ex-panse of gleaming Italian tile, and deep jeweltoned oriental rugs shone in the rain-gloom. The windows and French doors that led onto the terrace overlooking the Grand Canal were open, and sheer white curtains billowed back into the room, looking like blown mist. The walls and high ceilings were white. Everything danced with the reflected light from the canal; it was like being underwater. The room was awash in flowers in floor pots and tubs, in bouquets, in single crystal bud vases. A great basket of fruit and cheese, still ribboned and cellophaned, sat on a coffee table before a long sofa.

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“Lord,” I said. “There must be something to this Sam Forresthood business.”

“Ada has a way with concierges,” he said. “There was champagne, too, but I took it in to the newlyweds before I left to pick you up. Hoping, to tell you the truth, that it would knock them out for a spell. Want some fruit? Peel you a grape?”

“No, thanks,” I said, feeling suddenly shy about being in a hotel bedroom with Sam Forrest, even this most unboudoir-ish one. The bed in which, presumably, he and Ada would sleep was undisturbed and piled high with pillows, its hangings drawn around it like mosquito netting. It was possible to think of it as just another massive piece of furniture. Almost.

“Let me go check on Romeo and Juliet,” he said, vanishing into the bathroom that joined the rooms. In a moment he returned, grinning.

“Asleep. The spoon position. Great possibilities for the handicapped.”

Sam had his easel set up in front of one of the windows and had moved a big overstuffed armchair opposite it for me. The block of canvas that sat on the easel was not large, perhaps sixteen inches square. His pastels and a scurrilous-looking palette sat on a gilt table he had drawn up beside the easel. A thick monogrammed hotel towel covered everything.

“Would it be impossibly bourgeois of me to wonder if oil paint comes out of hotel towels, or do you just steal them?”

I said.

“I don’t worry about them anymore,” he said, holding a brush in his teeth while he fiddled with the blowing curtain at the window. “The first time the manager raised a stink Ada told him he could probably make a fortune selling them as Sam Forrest originals. I don’t

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know if he did, or does, but he hasn’t hassled me anymore.

Shit. This was right the first time. I think I like the light diffused through the curtain. Sit over there and let’s see what it does to your face.”

“May I look at your view first? It’s apt to be the only time I see the Grand Canal out a hotel window.”

We went onto the terrace, and I leaned my forearms on the padded cushion the hotel had placed on the balcony railing for just such pursuits and drank in the panorama of afternoon on the ancient fabled waterway. Just across, seemingly so close that you could see into its windows, a great white dome glowed in the shifting mist. It sat just at the point where the Grand Canal widened out into the basin of St. Mark and dominated the entire sweep of water and land. Its façade was baroque, a bulbous flower of grandness among all the lacy pointed arches and linear façades.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Santa Maria della Salute,” Sam said, still around the mouthful of brush. “The plague church. Built in the seven-teenth century as a little thank-you to Mary, who’s said to have stopped an outbreak of plague. Not, however, before about a third of the city corked off. Come on back in, Cat, I don’t want to miss this light; the rain and fog lifting is doing nice stuff. Pull your blouse down off your shoulders and lean your head back some—”

“Sam…”

He walked over to me and gave my sleeveless scoopnecked blouse a good yank off my shoulders, laid a length of fine, silky linen across them, and draped it. His face was very close to mine, and his hands were warm on my bare skin, but both eyes and hands were totally absorbed in their business; I felt I might have been anyone, a mannequin. I was grateful for his absorption. I HILL TOWNS / 199

hoped he did not notice the flush spreading over my chest and up my neck. My face felt very hot. It was not until the session was over that I realized he had draped me with one of Ada Forrest’s nightgowns. At least, I presumed it to be Ada’s.

He painted in silence for a while, whistling soundlessly between his teeth, stepping back and staring, moving forward again to slash a line here or there, stepping back again. The third or fourth of the malodorous Italian cigarettes he smoked was just sizzling itself out in a pool of thick umber paint on his palette when I said plaintively, “Can I move?”

He shook his head, as if coming out of water, and laid down the brush.

“Sorry,” he said, rescuing the cigarette. “Actually, you can move whenever you want to. This is more interpretive than literal. But go on and stretch. Want something to drink?”

“Maybe some mineral water.”

He gave me some from a bottle on the bar set up on a beautiful old painted console and poured himself a tumbler of raw gin. He drank it without ice, as I had seen him do before.

“I didn’t like what Joe said to you this morning, about the bridges,” he said abruptly. “I think it was a prick’s thing to say. I wondered why you took it.”

I was surprised and disoriented.

“I…because all it meant was he was feeling out of sorts with himself, feeling that he was—oh, losing himself, not knowing who he was or who I was,” I said. “You know how it is with Venice.”

“Tell me how it is with Venice,” he said, looking at me.

“I know I’m not telling you anything you don’t know, 200 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

as many times as you’ve been here,” I said. “And I don’t want you to think I don’t like it. I absolutely love it. It casts a spell.

But there’s something, Sam. Something…it isn’t the bridges, Joe knows that. It’s that…nothing is what it seems. You sense it instantly. And maybe nobody is who they seem, either, at least not while they’re here. That’s what he was feeling. He just picked up on the bridges because…”

“Because he saw a chance to humiliate his wife a little in front of a select group of her friends?”

“No. Not at all. Nobody else knows about the bridge; Joe doesn’t know I…I didn’t tell him I’d told you about it. He wouldn’t have told anybody himself.”

“I would not take any bets on that, Miz Compton Gaillard,”

Sam said. “You ready to get back to work?”

“What are you saying? That he’s told somebody?”

“I’m saying my dear wife has a way of getting the most astonishing things out of people and sharing them with others,” he said, grinning. “Can you tip your head back a little more? You have a nice arch to your neck.”

“You’re absolutely wrong if you think he told Ada or anybody else.”

I tipped my head back, looking up at the ceiling. He was silent, working fast.

“How did you meet Ada?” I said presently.

“I literally picked her up on the Spanish Steps,” he said.

“It was the middle sixties and I’d just come to Rome to paint and find myself and all that shit, and I’d had one New York show with good reviews and was fuller of shit than a Christmas goose, and I’d been through every girl who switched her pretty ass up and down the Spanish Steps.

Painted some of them and went to bed with all of them. And then one day there she was, in her little black miniskirt and high heels and white

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gloves, for God’s sake, and with her hair the color of a raven’s wing except for one white streak, carrying a big bunch of iris she’d just bought. There was a crowd of greasers three deep around her, and she was trying to get through them and go on up the steps, and I waded in there and got her by the arm and took her to the Hassler to tea. That’s what she wanted, tea. She’d just come up from some flyspecked little village outside Naples and found a job as a secretary to an importer of men’s hats…this when JFK had made hats obsol-ete all over the world. She’d never been away from home.

First I took her to bed, and then I painted her, and then I painted her some more, and by that time I was beginning to realize how much smoother my life ran with her around so…I married her. On the whole, I haven’t been sorry. She truly does think I’m an authentic genius, you know. And she has a way of making other people think that way. She’s been the best investment I ever made, over the years. Ada…enables. She makes a great many things possible.”

“Do you love her?”

“I don’t not love her,” Sam Forrest said. “It’s not a thing I think about much anymore. I need her, I guess. Isn’t it the same thing?”

“Robert Frost said something I’ve always liked about only when love and need are one,” I said, not liking the life, the world, of Sam and Ada Forrest that I extrapolated from his words.

“Do you love Joe?” he said.

“Well, of course I do,” I said. “I love him very much.”

“But you don’t need him.”

“That more than anything,” I said.

“No, you don’t. But you don’t know you don’t, yet. I think he knows it, though. Or he wouldn’t need to 202 / ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS

remind you of your fears, of what cripples you. What do you do at home, Cat? How do you spend your days? What did you study in school?”

“Art history,” I said. “And I was good at it. I was set to be a research assistant to the head of the department at Trinity.

I could have taught anywhere after that.”

“If you could have left your mountain. But of course, you couldn’t, and then you had your blind child, and then when she was launched, you had your garden and you had Joe’s career—”

“You make it sound like I’ve never done anything for myself,” I said, angry. “But I’ve had a wonderful life. I’ve had just what I wanted. We live a good life, Joe and I, a beautiful one.”

“And has he encouraged you to leave this beautiful life?

Has he wanted anything all your own for you?”

“He’s wanted what I wanted. What we have, that’s what we’ve wanted.”

“Are you happy, Cat?”

“Yes,” I said fiercely. “I’m very, very happy,” and began to cry.

He put down his brush and came over and held me against him, very gently. He rested his chin on my head. I smelled gin and sweat and paint: Sam.

“I want you to have something of your own, Cat, so he can’t do that to you again, that with the bridges—what he did this morning. I didn’t mean to make you cry. I have a shit-awful habit of poking my nose into things that don’t and never will concern me. You’re a lovely woman and I want a lot for you. That’s all. Go home. This is enough for now.

Put on something pretty. We’ll take you to Harry’s, you and Joe and Yolie. I was saving it for the last night, but maybe we all need it more now.”

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“You don’t have to,” I said, sniffling, but not moving out of his arms.

“Yeah, I do,” Sam said.

At seven o’clock that evening, Yolanda Whitney and I walked from the Fenice to Harry’s Bar on the Calle Vallaresso. Joe had said he would meet us there a little later; he had come in very late from his afternoon with Yolanda and Ada at the Accademia and wanted a nap and a bath. The rain had stopped and the heat was back with us, and he was flushed with it, and so voluble that I thought perhaps he might have a touch of fever, or heatstroke. But he felt cool to my touch, and brushed off my fretting with a swift kiss on the forehead and a pat on the behind, and then collapsed full length on the bed.

“Go on with Yolie at seven,” he mumbled. “She came back early, said she had an appointment. I think she has a boyfriend here. Ada and I had a drink afterward at the most marvelous place, a workingman’s bar, a thousand miles back in real Venice. I’ll take you before we leave; it’s not the kind of place tourists go. I’ll see you at Harry’s by eight. You won’t be ready to eat before then, anyway.”